Collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex and Zoom have naturally become indispensable to modern businesses, services delivered through a combination of the cloud and external service providers. While this model brings many advantages, such as scalability, rapid deployment, and reduced on-premise overhead, it also removes direct control and visibility from the organisation. For many IT and C-Suite leaders, these mission-critical environments are therefore riddled with blind spots, creating challenges in monitoring performance, managing costs, and ensuring a consistent employee experience.
Service provider and vendor portals often offer limited, fragmented, siloed, outdated insights into performance, usage, and costs. As a result, capacity planning is regularly reduced to guesswork, license overspend goes unchecked, incidents are resolved reactively, and productivity discreetly erodes.
The implications are profound. Without a crystal-clear view across their UC environment, organisations find themselves unable to align operations with ITIL best practices, contain budgets, or consistently meet SLA commitments. More strategically, they risk missing the critical opportunity to properly prepare their environments for the wave of AI-driven productivity tools such as Microsoft Copilot.
Enterprises that continue to rely on limited, external insights are effectively outsourcing control of their digital workplace destiny. The alternative is to take back ownership.
The Hidden Costs of Limited Visibility in UC Management
For all the investment poured into collaboration platforms, many businesses are still flying blind. The cloud providers themselves, Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom, are the primary sources of usage, performance, and cost data. Yet this information is fragmented, because service providers also hold an important part of the jigsaw. When both cloud and provider data are siloed, IT leaders are left to operate reactively rather than proactively. Wasted spend is one of the most immediate and visible consequences. Unused or misallocated licenses accumulate subtly, undermining budgeting and skewing forecasts.
However, financial leakage is but one part of the picture. Performance degradation routinely goes undetected until it has already impacted users, disrupting meetings, slowing decision-making, and degrading employee experience. Seamless communication is naturally integral to productivity in today’s hybrid workplace, rendering these lapses as major strategic risks.
There is also the matter of accountability. Without organisation-owned visibility, IT teams struggle to prove compliance with SLA commitments or to enforce accountability with providers. When incidents occur, resolution times lengthen because the enterprise must rely on an external party to act. What could be a contained disruption frequently escalates into a protracted issue. The end result is not only reduced productivity, but also diminished confidence in IT from business stakeholders.
Why You Must Regain Ownership of Their UC Destiny
The strategic case for taking back control is increasingly compelling. Organisations are realising that their collaboration platforms can no longer be managed through the rear-view mirror but instead need a single, real-time view of usage, performance, and user experience across all tools.
With this level of visibility, IT leaders can align management with ITIL best practices, such as optimising capacity to match demand, preventing service degradation before it hits end users, and resolving incidents in accordance with SLA commitments. Invaluably, this also elevates IT from a reactive service provider to a proactive business enabler.
The benefits extend well beyond operations and into finance and strategy. By owning their visibility, businesses can finally address the longstanding problem of license sprawl and ensure budgets are allocated where they truly deliver value. They can also make targeted improvement decisions and are well-equipped with data-driven insights rather than ideal speculation. The result is a more efficient, accountable and productive collaboration environment.
For C-Suite and tech leaders, regaining ownership of collaboration platforms is not simply a matter of operational hygiene but enabling IT to deliver measurable business outcomes, from cost optimisation to improved employee experience.
Building the Foundation for AI-Enabled Productivity
Perhaps the most strategic reason to act now lies in the future of work itself. Businesses are shrewdly exploring AI-powered productivity tools such as Microsoft Copilot and Zoom AI Companion. Yet the effectiveness of these technologies hinges heavily on the quality, consistency, and reliability of the underlying UC environment.
Without optimised performance, AI will struggle to deliver real value. Without clean, accurate data, insights will be compromised. And without automation to sustain improvements, the benefits of AI will be sporadic rather than systematic. In other words, businesses cannot fully exploit AI’s promise unless they first establish a robust management foundation.
By taking back control, IT leaders pave that foundation. A unified management layer makes it possible to automate ongoing processes, ensuring that performance remains high, SLAs are consistently met, and costs are contained. This operational maturity, in turn, makes AI adoption not only feasible but transformative. Far from being an incremental upgrade, it fundamentally allows organisations to unlock new levels of productivity and competitive advantage.
To Conclude: From Blind Spots to Business Value
Enterprises can no longer afford to operate their collaboration platforms with partial, siloed and outdated insights. The costs, in wasted spend, service lapses, and missed opportunities, are too high. The alternative is to take back control and gain real-time visibility, align management with ITIL best practices, and automate the processes that keep performance high.
Most importantly, regaining ownership is not just about addressing today’s inefficiencies. It is about preparing for tomorrow. By establishing a fully optimised and automated environment, businesses position themselves to adopt AI with confidence and to translate technological investment into tangible business value.
VOSS’s service management platform provides the visibility, analytics and automation enterprises need to achieve exactly that. By enabling IT leaders to take back control of their UC environments, VOSS transforms collaboration platforms from cost centres into strategic assets and sets the stage for AI-powered productivity. Find out more here.
